Gender-Order, Gender-System, Patriarchy
What all these different groups and strands in feminism have in common is that they attempt to name the gender-order, the gender-system and patriarchy as central to the problems women face in our society.
The gender-order is used to describe how societies in their social, political, religious, ethnic and economic organisation divide roles and responsibilities between men and women and as a result of this create different attributes or characteristics valued in each gender.
The gender-system is used to describe how societies build, maintain and reproduce these divisions along the lines of gender historically and politically. This includes informal modes of organisation (customs, rites, practices) and formal organisation (institutions, buildings, administrations and eco-systems).
Patriarchy is both a gender-system and a gender-order which privileges the role of men as patriarchs (feudal leadership, male authority figures/ heads of households, “natural leaders” in the church or State) or as the “dominant and leading” figures in how society is organised.
Feminism did not “invent” these aspects of how society is organised.
Feminism names them.
Feminism analyses them.
Feminism looks, in particular, at how asymmetrical relations between men and women are formed in, through and by the gender-order, gender-system and patriarchal relations.
Patriarchal relations, the gender-order, the gender-system have constructed how education is organised, how religion is practiced, how marriages take place, how people are born and buried, how the job market is organised, how culture (in its broadest definition of values, beliefs and ideas) itself is maintained and develops today.
These broad terms are used because they do not limit arguments to capitalism today and could be applied to feudalism (as capitalism’s precursor) or to economic life outside industrial capitalism or the different features of economies in developing countries. Whether capitalism is inherently patriarchal or makes use of features of pre-existing patriarchal gender-orders to develop its own gender-system is a much disputed topic in feminism. Whether capitalism or patriarchy informs every aspect of life and culture today is also much disputed. Whether globalisation as a process, an economic phenomena, or system of production/exchange today makes use of pre-existing gender-systems or patriarchal thought to shape the workplace/world for men and women as producers/consumers in particular ways and how it reproduces new/old features within capitalism’s gender-order is also much discussed.
Nevertheless, feminism(s) share the basic recognition that there is an unequal distribution of labour, talents, skills, knowledge, economic resources and capacity between men and women in society, politics and culture in the past and today.
This “gender gap” between men and women has changed in history and continues to change in our lifetimes. It is not measured by comparing individual men or women to eachother. It is judged by comparing tendencies and statistics in wages, occupations, economic indicators across different social groups in any given society at a particular moment. Individuals are always part of social groups, whether self-defined or identified as such by the terms of different analyses.
This unequal distribution of labour, talents, skills, knowledge, economic resources and capacity between men and women is not fixed, “natural” or “pre-ordained”. It has been and continues to be highly varied across different segments of society and different cultural groups. And it continues to change. It may be underpinned by customs and conventions, by rules and regulations, by law, by religions, by social, class and ethnic divisions, and by how institutions are built, operate and maintained as socially important. But as we all know, governments and leaders change, society changes, economies grow and contract, while many institutions of education, law, social welfare, civil society are established, reformed and abolished.
The effect of the prevailing gender-order, gender-system and patriarchy upon an individual’s woman’s everyday life is likely to be different, dependent on where she lives on this planet, her access to economic and cultural resources, to knowledge online/in libraries/in her surrounding culture/society, as well as the training/education and economic/ social/ cultural opportunities available to her where she lives and works.
Patriarchy is interwoven with and constructed through arguments about political representation for women and girls and about their representation in terms of cultural and social visibility, ie. about the roles women can/may/do occupy, about women’s lives and opportunities in education, in the labour market, and in their access to health care or social services combined with the competing and different attitudes to these issues and the voices of women in the culture surrounding them.
The majority of feminist arguments focus on how social differences and distinctions make use of gender to allot different places or positions for people in social, economic and political life. These differences determine how men and women are perceived differently along the lines of gender. “Ideology” in the “gender-order” appears as “natural” when it is, in fact, “naturalised” – i.e. its social and historical origins in social/political/economic organisation have disappeared. The key point for feminism is to question how and why these distinctions have occurred. Feminists have raised these questions about every religion, every culture (past and present), every social, ethnic and class grouping, and every aspect of society.
Feminism questions how the differences between men and women in terms of gender are often falsely attributed to biological differences. Questions of biology in these arguments are often reduced to women’s capacity to bear children (when not all women become mothers) or differences in physical muscle strength or female hormone cycles.
That men and women are as different within their sex, as between the sexes, is often ignored in these arguments. These biological characterisations of typical men vs. typical women are frequently presented as a valid reason that social, economic and political change cannot happen because of the dubious belief that biology is fixed or “natural”, when it is also in flux and highly variable.
There are differences between women in the same culture and the same peer group and these are not just to do with personal preferences/temperament or “choices” they’ve made, they are determined by economic/ social/ cultural forces, as much as by individual attitudes to combating (or reinforcing) sexism, racism, ethnic hatred, nationalism, xenophobia, homophobia or prejudices against those with mental/physical disabilities. This complex mix of determinations, attitudes, behaviours and “choices” affects how we see the world and how we act in it. This, and not biology, is what is examined in arguments about the social construction of genders and gender difference.
What is Feminist Theory?
Feminist Theory is as generic a term as feminism itself. Not only are there different feminist politics informing feminist theory but there are also many different branches of feminist theory which have developed since the 1960s: Cultural Feminism; Post-Structuralist Feminism; Queer theory (with and without explicitly feminist tendencies); Materialist feminism; US Third World Feminism; Feminist post-colonial thought; Intersectional Feminism; Eco-feminism and Black Feminism. (For definitions and examples, please refer back to page 3 of this lesson)
Feminism began its academic work through a critique of how traditional schools of thought consider the gender-order, the gender-system and patriarchal thought.
Each political form of feminism then started to develop:
- different methodologies (sets of methods or approaches)
- ontologies (belief systems or how belief and thought interact)
- epistemologies (systems of knowledge or how something is written about systematically)
…all of which fall under the title of feminism.
Feminist theory has stuck as a generic name for a body of theoretical work which emerged in the late 1980s and which attempted to rethink the legacy of feminism from the 1970s. This generic term, however, has a specific history because it developed a critique of essentialism within second-wave feminism by reviewing its key premises, as well as incorporating and examining many ideas from other contemporary schools of thought: postmodernism, post-colonialism and post-structuralism.
Above all feminism began with a disarmingly simple question: where are the women?
This question led to different explanations of the formation of patriarchy, questions about male bias in the disciplines, as much as it led to studies of women as producers of knowledge and to new studies of what women did, said and believed in the past and present.
This is why in every discipline, in every subject, in every political system, in everyday life and in culture, there are feminists asking questions about women.
These include questions about men and women as producers of knowledge, how male and female identities are formed, how masculine or feminine interests are formed and gendered pre-occupations identified and how value is attributed to areas of enquiry and particular questions.
Feminism, as it has emerged in different disciplines, not only starts with particular and distinct questions about that discipline and its history, debates and ideas, but has also uncovered, revised and changed how women themselves are studied as both objects and subjects. This is why feminism affects not only how topics, ideas and concepts are approached but also how fields of research, specific agendas and particular kinds of studies are generated.
Feminist Theory in Art and Art History
Feminists in art and art history departments began by collecting information about women artists simultaneously with asking questions about how women were represented in art. Courses on women artists were organised to develop the methods and ideas through which to study their work and consider women artists’ contribution to art. A history of women artists was assembled because women as cultural producers had been marginalised by art history as a discipline. New questions about why that happened were asked alongside new ideas about how to study women artists and reconsider their contribution to art and to society. Studying women artists was not just about assembling information, it required different and more adequate theoretical approaches to enable the analysis of works in terms of gender and genre. This was a collaborative effort, fuelled by many different kinds of critical, historical and curatorial exchanges, and it was a journey shared by many women, not just historians, but artists, critics and curators.
Studying men and women as separate groups, or including gender as an indicator of difference, has been a common method in social sciences for many decades. Gender can be studied in entirely androcentric (male-orientated) or gynocentric (female-orientated) ways.
In art, much work on the question of the nude in art falls into an androcentric category (i.e. the study of male painters representations of the female body). Although the majority of nudes painted are still of women’s bodies, this has not meant that it was women artists as cultural producers who were studied or that a group of male and female artists’ works are compared for their differing treatments of the nude (male or female). This method of studying an asymmetric gender relation (male producers/female bodies) is not the same as studying works by and about women as cultural producers in itself.
It is also possible to study the question of gender in representation or the work of women artists, without engaging with any feminist theory at all. However, to do so would be to “blinker” oneself against some of the most engaging forms of contemporary analysis – and it would mean deliberately “living in the past”, not simply having a different world view.
Feminist Politics/Feminist Theory
in Women’s Studies/Gender Studies
While all feminist politics is informed by feminist theory (especially in terms of praxis), the split between feminist activism and feminist theory is the outcome of developments in the late 1980s, when many feminist scholars entered the academy in large numbers and when the teaching of women’s studies was at its height in institutional terms. In the mid-late 1980s many departments and courses of women’s studies started to rename their courses as exploring “theories of gender” with the aim of expanding comparative analysis between the sexes. Many women working in women’s studies supported this move, others opposed it feeling that the emphasis on an area of scholarship by, for and about women – and which had only recently entered the academy – should be preserved.
Feminist research is informed by both politics and science (i.e. existing knowledge as it is taught and studied in disciplines). Disciplines relevant to this course are: fine art, art history, philosophy, visual culture, cultural studies, critical theory, art theory/criticism, art education and curatorial studies. Feminist research methods have developed in relation to the standard systems of knowledge enshrined in different disciplines, often beginning with a critique of assumptions and preconceptions in the discipline. While feminism is often discussed as interdisciplinary, many feminists do work in specific disciplines in Universities and their approaches have been developed in relation to both feminist politics and the knowledge formed within a discipline/science including the humanities.
The development of feminist methods is informed by feminist politics and, as a result, the many different tendencies within feminism offer different approaches to (and in) knowledge produced by women and knowledge about women. All the disciplines have developed in relation to economics, politics and culture, however much they have argued for “objectivity” and the removal of bias from the knowledge they have produced. Feminism has been explicit about this relationship, particularly on questions about asymmetrical relationships between genders in what has been produced as “knowledge” and what has been studied.
In the other lessons on this course, you may want to think back to the problems of “naming” feminism and the different tendencies within feminism as a politics and disparate models for feminist research.
Move on to Lesson 2
Feminism as analysis of
Gender-Order, Gender-System, Patriarchy
What is Feminist Theory and Feminist Research?
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